The lengths of most instant noodles are normally approximately 20 to 70 cm. In recent years, noodle strings as short as approximately 1 to 7 cm that can be eaten in soup form are required to be made to respond to diversification of customers' tastes. Especially countries overseas have high demand for noodle products with short noodle strings that can be eaten in soup form. For this reason, there is increased need for manufacturing short noodle strings in the instant noodle industry.
Instant noodles are normally produced in a series of the following steps: formation of dough by mixing flour and water; rolling; slicing into noodle strings; steaming or boiling the noodle strings; stretching; cutting; and drying. Generally a rotary blade is used to cut the noodle strings that are hung down. The noodle strings need to be cut short in the cutting step in order to obtain the short noodle strings described above.
An instant noodle production line is for industrially treating noodle strings for large number of servings and therefore can treat noodle strings at high speeds. In this situation, the number of cuts per unit time needs to be further increased in order to cut noodle strings short while keeping a certain weight of noodles per serving.
There is a method for increasing the rotating speed of the rotary blade in order to increase the number of cuts. On the other hand, noodle strings that are obtained before being cut are already gelatinized and therefore become highly viscous as a result of being braised or boiled. Consequently, increasing the rotating speed of the rotary blade occasionally causes the noodle strings that were unable to fall by their own weight immediately after being cut to be scattered by the cutting blade.
In fields other than instant noodles, there are cutting methods in the field of pasta such as macaroni, etc., as methods for slicing short noodle strings (pasta). The cutting method, however, is basically a product for producing noodle strings by extruding noodles through a die or the like. There is also a cutting device such as the one disclosed in, for example, Patent Literature 1; however, such a cutting device is not suitable for manufacturing instant noodles.
In the field of instant noodle manufacturing, a noodle string treatment apparatus and noodle string treatment method capable of manufacturing instant noodles of approximately 1 to 7 cm in length are not to be developed yet.